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He held out his hands and spun around, “Do I look dead to you, Sis?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “You look very much alive which leads me to my next question—why did you allow me to believe that you were dead this whole time? We had a funeral for you and everything. The Gemini Brothers shipped your body back in pieces to our parents. Do you know what that did to them?”
“That’s more than one question,” Pete teased.
“Don’t joke about this, Peter,” she insisted. “Mom almost had a nervous breakdown and Dad hasn’t been the same since the day they lowered your coffin into the ground. If that wasn’t you in the coffin, who was it?”
Pete shrugged, “Don’t really know who was in my coffin. It wasn’t me though.”
“I think that I’m going to need a bit more of an explanation than you don’t know who was buried in your place, Pete. What the hell is going on?”
“Can I come in and we can talk?” he asked. “I think that Joel should be a part of the conversation too, since he’s the one who has kept you safe this whole time, Sis.”
“How do I know that I can trust you?” she asked. “How do I know that you’re not working for Dante Gemini like he says you were?” Dante had told the CIA agent, who questioned him after he was first arrested, that Peter was a double agent. He convinced the agent that Pete was working for him. Trista had actually started to believe that her brother had double-crossed them all when pieces of his body started showing up. Why would Dante Gemini murder someone whom he claimed double-crossed the CIA for him? He wouldn’t, so Trista refused to believe his stories. Instead, she helped her parents bury her brother and was trying to move on. Until now, when she found her dead brother standing on Joel’s porch.
“Ahh, Dante told you that I was working for him,” he said. She nodded her head and he sighed. “Well, that’s actually good news. It’s just what I wanted him to believe. It’s why I had to stage my death. I’m sorry about upsetting Mom and Dad, but I had to do that to keep both of them and you safe.”
“Safe,” she spat, “how exactly do you think you’ve kept us safe? You put our whole family on Dante’s radar, and he won’t stop until we’re all dead. Mom and Dad are both in protective custody and Joel and I have been laying low while trying, and failing I might add, to bring down Dante’s trafficking ring.”
“I think that I can help with that,” Peter promised. “Please, just let me in so that I can explain everything from the beginning.”
Trista looked back at Joel, and he nodded. “It wouldn’t hurt to just hear him out, honey,” he said. She hated that he was right, but he was.
“Fine,” she said, “you can come in, but if I think that you’re lying to me, Pete, I’m tossing you out.”
“Got it,” he agreed. He walked past her and followed Joel into his house. They made their way to the kitchen, and she was sure that inviting her brother in was a big mistake. How was she ever going to tell her parents about their son lying to them? He deliberately hurt them all, and now, she was going to have to break that news to them.
“Sit and spill it,” Trista ordered, “and, start from the beginning.”
“Still as bossy as ever,” Peter teased. He sat at the end of the table and she and Joel sat at the other end. “I missed you, Sis,” he admitted.
“Well, if that was true, you would have found a way to tell me that you were alive,” she shouted.
“Right, but that would have put you all in danger,” Pete said.
“Yeah, you’ve already said that,” Trista reminded.
“Well, it bears repeating,” Pete said. “Everything that I did, I did it for my family—to keep you all safe.”
She nodded and waved her hands through the air. “Can you just get on with what happened, please?” Trista asked.
“I’ve been deep undercover on the Gemini case,” he said. “My mission was classified, and you didn’t have clearance to be in the know.”
“Bullshit,” Trista shouted. “I have top clearance. I have more clearance than you, Pete,” she said.
“Yeah, but this was top secret. I wasn’t allowed to talk about it to anyone, including you, Sis. God, I wanted to. I tried to convince the powers that be to let me confide in you. I didn’t want you or our parents to suffer because of me. I was turned down and told that you knowing—”
“Would put us all in danger,” she filled in for him.
“Right, so I went along with the plan and followed orders. I knew that I had to do whatever I could to bring down Dante and his trafficking ring,” Pete said. “But then, everything went sideways, and your new boyfriend here stormed in and arrested Dante. I was made, and I thought for sure that I was dead.”
“I was told that the Gemini Brothers figured out that you were an agent and that’s when they made an example out of you and murdered you,” Trista said.
“Yeah, that’s what the CIA wanted you to believe. They were the ones who got me out just before the Gemini brothers could make good on their threats. When they found out that I was an agent, they put me in a cell, telling me that they were going to hold me to let Dante deal with me. None of the other guys wanted to have my blood on their hands. They knew that killing an agent would land them on death row. Plus, it would piss Dante off if he didn’t get to kill me himself, once he made bail, so they left me in that cell to rot.”
“That’s awful, man,” Joel said.
“Yeah, it wasn’t very much fun, that’s for sure, but I was happy to just be alive, you know?” Pete asked.
